WoW’s subs continue to slide

On August 5, 2015 by Aaron Meehan

World of Warcraft’s subscription numbers has continued to slide with Blizzard revealing that the game has lost 1.5 million subscribers in Q2 2015.

This large loss means the MMORPG now has 5.6 million subscribers, down from 7.1 million subscribers announced in Q1 2015 earnings call. While 5.6 million subscribers for a pay to play MMO is nothing to sneeze at, and World of Warcraft continue to be the number 1 most subscribed to MMORPG, the last time World of Warcraft’s subscription numbers was this low was back in December 2005, almost a full 10 year ago.

The 5.6 million figure has also shown that Warlords of Draenor -the game’s latest expansion – was unpopular. When the expansion first launched the number of subscribers rose from 7.4 million to 10 million, which is in line with WoW expansion trends, but as you can now see since the expansion was launched the game has lost 4.4 million subscribers. No explanation was given for the drop in subs over the expansion’s life, but in my opinion I would say it was due to the fact the expansion appeared to be light on content, and content that was added was either repetitive or irrelevant (see the ability to take selfies in patch 6.1).

To get an idea of how WoW’s subs have risen and fallen over its lifetime check out the chart made by MMO-Champion.

It will be interesting to see what will happen with World of Warcraft in the future, Blizzard are announcing the game’s sixth expansion later this week, which should help recover some lost subs, but there is also the issue that there are no more planned content updates between now and the expansions release.

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